With the advent of pagers and mobile phones the wireless service industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association calculates that 120 million Americans own a mobile telephone—about half of the U.S. population. As the development and availability of mobile telephones progresses the benefits of mobile telephones are reaching more and more people. The online availability of ring tones and songs for download via a personal computer (PC) and transfer to a mobile telephone has also enjoyed increasing popularity. Mobile telephone users prefer to download their own ring tones or songs instead of being restricted to the limited amount of sounds provided on a mobile telephone upon purchase. This feature, however, has not come without its drawbacks.
A complaint of mobile telephone users is that downloaded Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) ring tones and songs do not sound the same or at the same relative volume level on a PC as they do on a mobile telephone. MIDI is a hardware specification and protocol used to communicate note and effect information between sound/music synthesizers, computers, music keyboards, controllers, and other electronic music devices. The basic unit of information in the MIDI protocol is a “note on/off” event which includes a note number (pitch) and key velocity (loudness). There are also other message types for events such as pitch bend, patch changes and synthesizer-specific events for loading new patches etc. There is a file format for expressing MIDI data which is a dump of data sent over a MIDI port.
Because of the manner in which MIDI ring tones and songs are played on different devices, sounds often play differently or at disparate relative volume levels on a PC as they do on a mobile telephone. This is because a MIDI player is a proprietary design with its own frequency modulation synthesis techniques and its own instrument sets, each of which have a default volume level. Since each instrument has a particular volume level that is dependent on the playing device's synthesis technique, it is not possible to assess the perceptual volume difference of a MIDI sound until it is present on the playing device.
Related to this, mobile telephone users have expressed a strong desire to be able to load their own original ring tones and songs into their mobile telephones. Normally, the original ring tones and songs are not optimized for the mobile telephone on which it is loaded, leading to distorted sounding tones and increased customer complaints.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.